Your company can choose to accept a variety of payment methods such as credit cards, direct debit (for example, ACH), or even allow your customers to pay by PayPal. The more payment methods you accept the more customers you can reach. You can also allow your customers to store multiple payment methods in their customer account, if for example, they have a credit card they want to use for recurring charges and another credit card they want to use for only one time charges. Many customers will begin using electronic payments for credit cards only, then consider accepting other forms of electronic payment such as direct debit. Accepting direct debit payments has many advantages, including lower processing fees compared to credit card processing. This article provides helpful information on how you can begin supporting direct debit payments.

Work with your payment gateway and processor to ensure they can support the specific type(s) of direct debit you want to accept. Also, make sure your merchant account is properly enabled to process such payments.

Zuora supports ACH for the following gateway integrations among others: Authorize.net, CyberSource, Chase Paymentech Orbital, and Vantiv. We also support European direct debit. See Direct Debit for GlobalCollect.

Enabling Direct Debit in Zuora

Z-Payment Settings

Accepting ACH payments in Zuora is very straight forward, whereas supporting direct debit in other countries can be bit more involved (due to requirements around mandates). The first step is the same for accepting any type of direct debit. That is, you must enable the payment methods you want to accept by going to Zuora > Settings > Z-Payments Settings > Payment Method > Customize Payment Methods > Select the ACH payment method (for US Direct Debit) and select Bank Transfer (for all other Direct Debit types) and make sure the payment methods you want to support are all marked as Active.

Direct Debit Payment Methods You Can Create Are Gateway Dependent

Once you have enabled the ACH and/or Bank Transfer payment methods in your Z-Payment settings, you can now create these payment methods for your customer accounts. Every customer account has a Payment Gateway selected (under the Billing and Payment Term section), and the payment methods you can create for a customer account depends on the Payment Gateway selected for that account since the payment methods we support vary slightly by gateway.

Example:

You use PayPal for any customer wanting to pay using the PayPal payment method.

You use Ingenico ePayments for your European customers who want to pay using direct debit/bank transfer.

You have enabled your Z-Payment settings to accept both ACH and Bank Transfer.

Three customers subscribe to your service: one in the US and one in Germany who want to pay by direct debit, and another customer in the US who wants to pay by PayPal.

You will create three different customer accounts in Zuora, but you will assign each customer account the correct gateway. That is, for the US customer you will assign the CyberSource payment gateway, the customer in Germany is assigned the Ingenico ePayments payment gateway, and the US customer paying by PayPal is assigned the PayPal gateway.

When you go to create the payment methods for each of these customers, the payment methods you can choose from (to create) is dependent on the payment gateway assigned to the customer account.

Payment Integrations that Support ACH and Direct Debit/Bank Transfer

Here's what you will see when you create an electronic payment method for ACH or direct debit/bank transfer for each of our payment gateway integrations: